Identify and Analyze Innovations

The specific practice Collect and Analyze Improvement Proposals analyzed proposals that were passively collected. The purpose of this specific practice is to actively search for, locate, and analyze innovative improvements. This search primarily involves looking outside the organization.

• Analyze the set of standard processes to determine areas where innovative improvements would be most helpful.

  These analyses are performed to determine which sub-processes are critical to achieving the organization's quality and process-performance objectives and which ones are good candidates to be improved.

• Investigate innovative improvements that may improve the organization's set of standard processes. Investigating innovative improvements involves:
  • Systematically maintaining awareness of leading relevant technical work and technology trends
  • Periodically searching for commercially available innovative improvements
  • Collecting proposals for innovative improvements from the projects and the organization
  • Systematically reviewing processes and technologies used externally and comparing them to those used within the organization
  • Identifying areas where innovative improvements have been used successfully, and reviewing data and documentation of experience using these improvements
• Analyze potential innovative improvements to understand their effects on process elements and predict their influence on the process. Process performance models can provide a basis for analyzing possible effects of changes to process elements.
• Analyze the costs and benefits of potential innovative improvements. Innovative improvements that have a very large cost-to-benefit ratio are rejected.
• Create process- and technology-improvement proposals for those innovative improvements that would result in improving the organization's processes or technologies.
• Select the innovative improvements to be piloted before broad scale deployment. Since innovations, by definition, usually represent a major change, most innovative improvements will be piloted.
• Document the results of the evaluations of innovative improvements.